Paul McAuley is the author of The Quiet War, as well as Life After Wartime and Evening's Empires. He's also got an amazing collection of 1970s SF paperbacks, whose covers he's just digitized to share with the world. Here's his gallery of covers that feature spaceships done in a cool, psychedelic-minimalist style.

All the covers were scanned from books in my collection, and I bought almost all of them (the two exceptions are The Machine in Shaft Tenand The Caltraps of Time) in the 1970s. Back then, it seemed as if every other science fiction paperback had a spaceship on its cover; even though the proportion was probably somewhat less, spaceships were a major signifier, and catnip to my younger self.

You may have noticed that none of the covers are of books by women. There were plenty of women publishing science fiction novels and short story collections back then - Octavia E Butler, Suzette Haden Elgin, Ursula Le Guin, Tanith Lee, Anne McCaffery, Vonda McIntyre, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon), and Kate Wilhelm, for instance - but they didn't seem to get spaceships on their covers. They mostly got people instead. No doubt Freud would have something to say about that.

You can read more of McAuley's musings about science fiction, science and other topics on his blog. Credits for the art on each of these covers are at the bottom of this post.